On Tour #3- Santa Cruz

Seriously, this was our van- Richard was in the swivel chair blasting the tunes and doing some editing on the video suite. Andrew had the solar powered blender going making us smoothies from mother earth's bounty, and I drove. The entire thing was organic and we recycled it after the last show.

At this point we're at the Sunday after the Mav's contest and scattered- Andrew over at the Hess surfboard batcave checking it all out, RK having some exotic breakfast with underground OB big wave guys and me doing the show cleanup with Aleks and enjoying a beautiful sunny morning enhanced by fine San Fran coffee- it's a very civilized town. We reconvened at Ocean Beach which was about as uncivilized as it gets- huge, blown about and terrifying. I've paddled out there on a maybe head high day and it took a solid 45 minutes for me to figure away through, so on a double overhead day like this I was staying well clear. Awesome to watch though and the occasional cloud break sets a mile or so out were amazing. There were a few takers that morning, Danny Hess among them, but fog rolled in and we rolled out for more functional waves. The coast was truly lit up, nearly every glimpse of ocean we had coming down to Santa Cruz showed waves, many big. Pigeon Point was worth a stop and cameras out- huge, hollow rights cranking down the line from the point and to the south there was an equally monumental left cranking up the beach, and all in the most stunning setting imaginable. Santa Cruz was still going off and the Casper's worked their magic until dark and our late arrival at the Mill Gallery for our last minute show. Top german photographer Patrick Trefz had set this one up for us and was pretty done in himself having arrived back from Hawaii at 6 that morning, so it luckily stayed low key. The by now standard array of great characters showed up, Sway's legend Steiny was in full force and a genuine Viking in the form of one Kirkaby turned up too. This guy freedives all over NorCal and has kneeboarded at Mavericks, so he's not fooling about. He was rocking a slew of gold rings and a seal skin vest and is currently my style hero. A fine night followed by one of the coldest attempts at sleeping I've ever had, and off to Rincon we went, as per the Skip post. I'm getting tired just remembering this.